The Google+ “stupid Facebook clone”

This entry was posted on June 7, 2012 by Pure Mobile.

By Aldo Panessidi

There’s no doubt that Google organized a big community really fast with its Google+ social network, but a former Engineering Director at Google is denouncing the service as a means to an end: creating a tool to gather as much information as possible on users for the purpose of capturing more dollars from its advertisers. Sounds very similar to Mobile service providers creating locked in long term contracts that siphon more and mo0re money from users.

Spencer Tipping, a programmer who left Google about a month ago, authored a blog post describing the pros and cons of the Google culture. His post delves into the technological environment and the corporate culture at the company. He called Google+ a big corporate culture con game.

As Tipping put it, “I think Google+ is an effort that does not deserve the engineering minds at Google. This is mostly a personal bias. I see Google as solving legitimately difficult technological problems, not doing stupid things like cloning Facebook. Google, in my opinion, lost sight of what was important when they went down this rabbit hole.”

Tipping admitted that he disagreed with what he called Google’s “ubiquitous political emphasis on Google+ that sometimes compromised other engineering efforts.”

Tipping might be carrying some baggage on the subject of Google+, but the pros in his blog post outweighed the cons. He also said he left the company “mostly because I wanted to take the time to pursue stuff closer to my interests.”